Australia's offshore detention regime is a brutal and obscene piece of self-delusion

The billions spent on an armada to Australia’s north and west is stopping people smugglers, not the government’s needlessly cruel stance

Asylum seekers arriving by boat are escorted by navy patrol boats in 2012. The need to be seen to be ‘tough on borders’ has outweighed all other considerations in Australian political life.
Photograph: Scott Fisher/EPA

The most dangerous mistruth in current Australian politics is that in order for lives to be saved at sea, other people – accused of no crime – must be indefinitely and arbitrarily punished offshore.

Asserted with increasing confidence as fact, this unproven link is used to justify Australia’s brutal regime of offshore detention as a necessary condition for a policy that, however harsh, ultimately serves a greater good.

The need to be seen to be “tough on borders” has outweighed all other considerations, pushing successive governments towards increasingly extreme positions, grotesque cruelties and risible rhetorical contortions in insisting their actions are reasonable, legal, or morally defensible.

Since its inception the policy has been roundly and repeatedly criticised – but mostly outside Canberra. Failure, scandal, abuse and death has occurred under the watch of both main parties. In recent weeks the world has watched aghast as the Papua New Guinea arm of the policy lurched towards its bitter end, driven along by swinging metal bars and the enforced thirst of hundreds of men.

Timeline

Manus Island detention centre

21 November 2012

Manus Island reopened

Julia Gillard's Labor government reopens detention centre – not used since 2004 – and the first 19 asylum seekers arrive from Christmas island.

New Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd announces people who seek asylum by boat will never be settled in Australia, with all sent to Manus or Nauru.

17 February 2014

Reza Barati dies

Three days of violence leaves 70 detainees seriously injured, with some shot by police, stabbed and with their throats slit. Iranian detainee Reza Barati is murdered after security guards inflict fatal head injuries during the riot.

More than 500 men begin a two-week hunger strike in protest against conditions on the island. Two stitch their lips together, three swallow razor blades and collapsing strikers have to be forcibly removed by security.

21 July 2015

Healthcare failings revealed

A Guardian investigation reveals widespread failings in the healthcare services provided by IHMS in detention centres, including Manus Island.

27 August 2015

Rape allegation

A PNG woman employed by Transfield alleges she was raped by Australian colleagues inside the centre. The alleged perpetrators are flown out of the country.

PNG immigration officials confirm the centre will close on 31 October, and tell detainees to 'consider their options'. Over the following months basic services are shut down around detainees, to encourage them to leave

14 June 2017

$70m compensation

The Australian government settles a class action, paying $70m compensation to more than 2,000 detainees for illegal detention and mistreatment, but denies any liability.

7 August 2017

Hamed Shamshiripour dies

Iranian asylum seeker Hamed Shamshiripour is found dead, having taken his own life. His friends say they pleaded with the Australian government to provide treatment for his mental health problems.

Reduced to its basest element, Australian government policy is to begrudgingly treat those who legally sought its asylum – by one mode of transport, by boat – with axiomatic cruelty, in order to discourage others from paying people smugglers and hopping into leaky boats across south-east Asia. This policy saves lives, they say, because it deters others.

But it’s not this policy that’s stopping the boats from reaching Australian shores. Australia has spent billions of dollars putting an armada to sea in the waters to the country’s north and west.

Asylum boats continue to ply the waters of the region and attempt to reach Australia. They do so in much smaller numbers now because they are intercepted, boarded and their passengers and crew forcibly turned around. Protection assessments are conducted at sea – a policy considered illegal under international law by almost every expert opinion, including that of the United Nations.

But were Nauru and Manus to be emptied tomorrow, Australia’s “ring of steel” – in immigration minister Peter Dutton’s phrase – would continue to stop boats.

When Australia abdicated responsibility for its detention centre on Manus Island, withholding food, water and electricity, hundreds of men stayed in the centre they loathed. They felt – and had evidence to back their claims – that they would be unsafe on alternative sites in the main town of Lorengau.

The Guardian reported from the detention centre on what Australia’s policy had become reduced to: the poisoning of wells and the gouging of water tanks, police destroying food supplies and using metal batons against refugees whom Australia is legally required to protect.

Among the refugees holding out there – drinking dirty water and rationing their dwindling food – there was defiance amid the decay, and a solidarity born of new agency. After four-and-a-half years of having to line up for every meal, of having to fill out a form to request medical treatment that might never come, of being corralled and quarantined behind high steel fences and sequestered into smaller and smaller cells, the men on Manus were briefly back in charge of their lives. Each night, the refugees took great ceremony in locking the main gate to the detention centre. They were guards of their own prison but it was they who were in control.

Throughout the standoff, practical solutions were proposed. Australia’s top medical professionals offered to arrange and conduct medical assessments at their own cost if the Australian government could help with their visas.

New Zealand offered – again – to resettle 150 people, only to be rebuffed once again. When that was refused, New Zealand offered cash to improve conditions on the Papua New Guinea island. That too was refused. The Australian government says the New Zealand offer dilutes the “stop the boats” deterrent, at the same time as continuing to prosecute its plan to send even greater number of refugees to the US. The same rules seemingly do not apply. The argument that refugees who resettle in New Zealand could not, then, be prevented from coming to Australia is hopelessly flawed: there are already New Zealand citizens Australia prevents from travelling to Australia.

Last week the joint PNG police and immigration operation changed its code name from “Helpim Friends” to “Klinim Base” and officers moved in, clearing the site in less than two days. The journalist Behrouz Boochani, a regular contributor to the Guardian, was hunted, arrested and beaten. Médecins Sans Frontières was denied access to the men. After five days of asking politely the humanitarian medical aid group went public. MSF rarely goes public with complaints or criticisms, preferring to maintain relationships with host countries and continue their work with patients, but felt it was warranted in this instance.

The Australian government says the New Zealand offer dilutes the 'stop the boats' deterrent.

Australia said little. The prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, and Dutton parroted the line that the men had accommodation to go to and were simply trying to pressure the Australian government.

Speaking through the safe mediums of Twitter and Ray Hadley’s radio show, Dutton furiously declared it was everyone else who was wrong. Dutton said he knew the truth of the lies spread by detainees, advocates, the United Nations, Amnesty International, Médecins Sans Frontières, the Australian Council for International Development, the Australian Medical Association, the Human Rights Commission, Human Rights Watch, the New Zealand government, PNG’s supreme court, PNG’s grand chief, Sir Michael Somare, multiple member nations of the UN, Australian voters, even the front page of News Corp’s Daily Telegraph.

Whether a symptom of the post-truth era or simply stubbornness, the government dismissed eyewitness accounts and even pictures and footage that clearly showed only one of the three alternative accommodation sites was fit for habitation.

There has always been a disconnect between the frustrated self-defence of the Australian government and the accounts of refugees, human rights groups, independent observers and foreign governments, but it has never been more stark than the past month.

With the scant faith in the US deal waning still further among refugees, the government’s ideal resolution is that the men give up, settle in at East Lorengau transit centre where the conditions are good or in one of the two unfinished places if they were unlucky enough to end up there, and stop complaining. Alternatively, the hope goes, the men could be resettled away from Australia or repatriated, and Australia and PNG could declare the centre closed.

The government throws money at its problem, but this issue requires fewer dollars and more imagination. Thousands more will be spent to coerce people to return to the known dangers of their homeland; some $250m has been earmarked for Manus Island alone this year.

An alternative to Australia’s current regime would be that people seeking safety by dangerous boat journey were intercepted – even rescued – and taken to a place of safety. These people can be processed and resettled to third countries where possible. This new regime would need commitments of money, of expertise, and political capital. It would, like any system, be imperfect and a small minority would seek to exploit it.

But the guiding principle must be: do Australia’s actions increase the amount of protection in the world for those who need it? Australia’s current arrangement categorically fails this fundamental question.

Stopping boats at sea does not necessarily mandate that those stopped must then be punished, month after month, year after year, in indefinite and arbitrary detention. The two are not linked.

That’s why the current suffering on Manus is especially confronting: it is unnecessary. There has been no war, no natural disaster. It is a catastrophe of conscious and political creation.